The Hills of Lakeway

The feel of The Hills

The Hills of Lakeway — formally the Village of The Hills, its own incorporated municipality inside the Lakeway fabric — is the Austin area’s classic gated club community, and it commits to the identity completely. Established in 1981 around a Jack Nicklaus Signature course, it’s roughly two decades of housing arranged along fairways and cul-de-sacs under a canopy of mature live oaks, entered through staffed gates and governed by its own village council. Where Lakeway at large is a city with golf in it, The Hills is a club with a village around it.

Life here orbits The Hills Country Club, now operated by Invited: the Nicklaus Signature course with its waterfall-backed finishing hole, the Nicklaus-designed Flintrock Falls course next door, and — under the same membership umbrella — the Yaupon and Live Oak courses in old Lakeway, plus the Sports Complex, the racquet campus known for decades as the World of Tennis. Four courses and a serious tennis pedigree on one membership is a genuinely rare package in Texas, and the social calendar that comes with it is the community’s actual amenity.

The homes and the market

The stock spans the community’s whole history: 1980s and 1990s custom homes on the original Signature course streets, 2000s builds in later sections, and the newer Flintrock-area homes at the top of the market. Sizes run from about 1,800 square feet in the garden-home sections to 8,000-plus in the estate pockets, on quarter-acre to two-acre lots. Per public market data, mid-2026 (verify current): pricing runs from the $600Ks to roughly $4M, with the middle of the market recently around $900K–$1M.

That entry point is the community’s quiet argument — a gated Nicklaus-course address in Lake Travis ISD for the price of a production home elsewhere in the corridor. The catch is age. Much of the inventory carries 1980s–2000s bones: original windows, dated kitchens, roofs and systems on second or third replacement cycles. We walk these homes with renovation math open, because the difference between a $700K listing and a comparable $1.1M one is usually $250K of someone else’s completed updates. Buyers wanting truly current architecture should compare Serene Hills; buyers wanting new construction entirely should look at Rough Hollow’s final phases.

Schools, taxes, and the membership line

Schools are Lake Travis ISD — the general pattern runs Lakeway Elementary to Hudson Bend Middle to Lake Travis High, all well-regarded, and all to be verified by address since district boundaries have moved as LTISD grows.

The tax story is unusual and favorable: the Village of The Hills levies one of the lowest municipal rates around Austin — under ten cents per $100 in recent years — so the effective stack (county, LTISD, village, districts) typically lands around 1.7–2.0% before exemptions; verify per parcel and year. But read the full carrying cost before celebrating. HOA dues run by section, and the association requires residents to hold at least a social membership at The Hills Country Club — with golf memberships (initiation plus monthly dues) a meaningful step beyond that. Confirm the current membership schedule directly with the club during your option period; the terms change, and they belong in your monthly budget next to the mortgage, not as a footnote. This structure is why The Hills looks inexpensive on Zillow and isn’t, quite — and why it’s a genuine value for households who will actually live at the club.

Getting around

There is no way to dress this up: The Hills lives on RM 620, and 620 is the west side’s signature traffic problem. Downtown Austin runs 40–55 minutes via 620 to 71, more when the corridor has an incident; the airport is an hour at peak; the Domain and north tech employers run 45–60 via 620 north. TxDOT’s widening work helps at the margins. Inside the bubble, daily life is short-range — the club, Lakeway’s medical campus, the Grove, and the H-E-B on 620 are all within ten minutes, and the Hill Country Galleria in Bee Cave is fifteen. Retirees and remote workers barely notice the corridor; daily downtown commuters will notice nothing else.

Who it fits

The Hills fits club people — golfers first, but also tennis households and the socially organized, for whom the dining rooms, tournaments, and calendars are the reason to move rather than a tax on it. It suits empty nesters trading a big in-town house for lock-and-leave fairway living, and value-minded buyers willing to renovate 1990s bones into a seven-figure setting.

It does not fit amenity agnostics — the mandatory membership makes that an expensive shrug — nor daily downtown commuters, nor buyers who want lake access as the headline, which is Rough Hollow’s brief. Our practice here is simple: we make clients price the whole package — purchase, renovation, taxes, HOA, membership — against the alternatives before falling for the waterfall hole. Those who buy with clear eyes tend to stay for decades, which tells you most of what you need to know about the place.